President of the NRA from 2013 to 2015, James W. Porter II is a charicature of a gun-toting, racist Alabaman landowner, of the kind who refers to the American Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression.
A conspiracy theorist (of course), Porter received some attention for calling President Obama a “fake President” who, according to Porter, planned to use Medicare to create a gun registry. (Conspiracies related to the threat of a federal gun registry have been a scare pushed by the NRA for decades, of course.) In particular, Porter claimed that Medicare enrollees are asked to disclose household gun ownership, which is easily demonstrably false. He also claimed, relying on a wingnut conspiracy theory circulating at the time, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seeking to “kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations” in reference to the US supporting a proposed measure placed before the UN that would regulate global trade in conventional arms, a measure otherwise opposed only by North Korea, Syria and Iran (for obvious reasons). It is worth mentioning that Porter and the NRA were, at the time, consorting with Russian agents, in particular the Russian group Right to Bear Arms, a group deliberately created to get access to influential conservative figures. Porter also called Eric Holder “rabidly anti-American,” accusing him of trying to brainwash the American people into giving up their gun.
As president of the NRA, Porter advocated that civilians should be trained in the use of military weapons for both international and domestic war.
Diagnosis: Deranged conspiracy theorist, and hence an obvious candidate for leadership positions in the NRA. Reading the above description, I am sure many would think that “hey, these views are pretty mainstream and nothing out of the ordinary,” so it is worth stopping for a moment to think about how deranged they really are.
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